Gentoo as a NAS?

FrankRizz0 · l33t Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 617

Morning all!

Hopefully I'm asking this in the right place. I am curious to know if anyone is using Gentoo as a NAS? I just installed Open Media Vault on a workstation I purchased recently (very cheap) and to say the least, I am not happy at all with OMV. I've only been playing with it for a few hours, but I'd love to have a LOT more control over the system, and decide what is and what is not installed (it honestly seems like I'm back to using Windows). It also seems that it would be a lot easier to install Gentoo, fuse the drives together with mhddfs, share the folder and you're up and running. I've done a few google searches and I haven't had much luck trying to find someone who is using Gentoo as a NAS, besides someone talking about hardware in the forums here. Anyhow, if there's someone using Gentoo in this way, first am I right? Is it an easier, more enjoyable experience using Gentoo than the out of the box FreeNAS or OMV? What software did you use? What have been your biggest issues? etc.

Thanks in advance for any input to this thread!

Naib · Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2018 1:15 pm Post subject:

I do, I have a little VIA box that has Gentoo on it. Primarily as a NAS but also acting as a git server, redmine, irc etc...
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#define Int main()
#define Return printf
#define Print return
#include <stdio>
HelloWorld Int {
Return("Hello, world!\n");
Print 0;

FrankRizz0 · l33t Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 617

Nice! If you don't mind me asking, what packages are you using for your NAS, what issues have you run into, do you have any recommendations for someone who is COMPLETELY new to network mapping, etc?

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2018 3:50 am Post subject:

I have three of these. Two are old Athlon 64x2 systems with 4GB each, and four 1TB disks each. I use BTRFS RAID10 on them. Samba hosts shares for Windows clients. No desktop, shell only, tiny install. I also have a new one with a Xeon and 8GB in it, but the same BTRFS RAID10 setup. Works wonderfully. I create a subvolume for each share so they can individually be snapped and such.
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Gatak · Apprentice Joined: 04 Jan 2004 Posts: 174

Gentoo is great as NAS. But then it boils down to what your needs are.

I use Gentoo as NAS with

* Samba as file share. With automatic snapshots exported as 'previous versions' to Windows clients.
* Nextcloud as front end and mobile sync (files, contacts, calendar).
* Btrfs filesystem. RAID 1 for critical and RAID 0 for other stuff.
* External backup with btrbk

Run a few other stuff too like xmpp (prosody), dhcpd, nsd, unbound etc..

The automatic btrfs snapshot guide: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Samba_shadow_copies (but I would use btrbk instead of the supplied script as it has more features)

FrankRizz0 · l33t Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 617

I think I've perfected the simplicity of turning a Gentoo box into a darn good NAS. My current set up is an A10(?) With a 2 mediafire pro boxes (32TB of storage), fuse and sshfs. I use Kodi as my media player and run it with my phone (Yatze). I honestly can't see a need for OMV or FreeNAS.

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

I don't have recent experience building a NAS. But I've built several over the years.

I stopped building them a few years back because, for a work environment, you simply can't build one for what you can buy one for. A commercially built NAS has fine-tuned hardware, possibly even a custom motherboard. They buy the parts in bulk to drive the cost down, they build them on an assembly line and the software is fine-tuned and configured right on the image they burn to the disk. If you actually pay yourself to build the NAS then you are better off buying one off the shelf.

BUT...

If you want something very specific, a commercially built NAS can be a massive pain in the ass.

IMO the only 3 reasons you might try anymore, as far as I can think of, are:

You have extremely specific needs which can't be met by commercially available hardware
You're building one for your home, or a small non-profit, or similar, and simply can't afford to buy a good NAS and so you're using a 10-year-old desktop.
You're educating yourself on how to build a NAS and don't care about cost or performance.

It seems to me like you might be in the first group, except for the mhddfs comment which IMO is insanely risky if you intend to actually store valuable information on it. Either you don't care about the integrity of your data, or you haven't been screwed over by disk failures yet.

FrankRizz0 · l33t Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 617

I did have a drive fail on me recently, and losing the data on it 'kinda' sucked. I built my NAS simply to share media on all my HTPC's, instead of loading a movie or TV show on an external drive or transfer it between pooters. There's nothing overly important, or at least nothing that can't be replaced (TV shows and movies) that's on my NAS. The videos & photos of my son/wife are backed up on all of my pooters and their secondary drives, I would never leave that to chance. Even using raid I still would not use only my NAS to house files of such importance.

As for the hardware, I do not need much. I bought a cheap server (second hand) and I have 3 additional boxes that were put together with very inexpensive hardware because all they really do is play video files and MP3's. I considered using a binary distro when I realized how much I disliked OMV/FreeNAS, but this would eventually demand upgraded hardware long before Gentoo would. Gentoo coupled with Fluxbox & i3 gives me the continued stability and speed on old hardware. I'm not launching a submarine and I'm definitely not making a NAS so I can (or others can) connect outside of my network.

In conclusion, building my NAS is/was as enjoyable as being able to watch and listen to what I've archived in almost every room in our house. If anyone else would love to share their experiences with a NAS that they've built I would LOVE to hear about it. I'm sure a lot more people would as well.

jaskaran · n00b Joined: 05 May 2021 Posts: 5

A few years late to the party, anyone got any updates on their experience running gentoo for their nas?

Similar to @FrankRizz0 I can't stand TrueNas and feel like I'd be happier running my nas directly on a slim gentoo.

gentoo -> zfs -> dirs mounted to containers in k3s or docker compose

Any reasons why the above setup should be avoided?

jaskaran · n00b Joined: 05 May 2021 Posts: 5

The only valuable things I would store would be family pictures which I'll backup to a cloud, there's not loads gb wise either. Everything else can be lost and I won't be too sad. Otherwise my motivations are learning and fun!